A review of Scale By the Bay by competition winner, Iratxo

We had the chance to meet Iratxo and Iniyan, who won tickets to Scale By the Bay through our competition in October. We always endeavour to support the Scala community in any way possible and being able to give two people the opportunity to attend Scale By the Bay, who may not have been able to otherwise, felt really good. We recently caught up with the winners and here is competition winner Iratxo’s write up of his experience at Scale By the Bay…

Firstly, thanks to Signify for inviting my co-worker and I to this wonderful event. We won the Scale By the Bay competition and were very excited about it. It all started on a Wednesday workshop, a day before the conference. We were doing exercises and tutorials for getting cloud applications on Kubernetes with gRPC and Istio. In this hands-on workshop I learnt how to take a Cloud Native Application from inception to production. This workshop was taught by a unique team of engineers who have a wide range of experience with gRPC and Istio. The workshop was created by Grand Cloud and Google. The workshop was very hands on, and informative.

On next day at the Twitter HQ, after the much-needed breakfast and coffee, the conference began. It was separated into 3 rooms; Data, Reactive, and Functional, so sometimes it was difficult to make a choice. As a developer from a more functional background I was naturally inclined to this sort of talk. John De Goes gave a very interesting talk about Scalaz 8, proving that it’s possible to have a high-performance system, without sacrificing rigor when writing a purely functional Program. As an individual that is interested in always growing professionally I found myself on multiple talks about Spark. I found “Avoiding Spark Pitfalls at scale” covering common mistakes, and how to prevent them, very illuminating as well. On Friday, I attended one of my favourite talks of the entire conference. “FS2 Internals: Performance” I have to admit that I’m biased here, since FS2 is a functionally pure streaming library that I have been using for some time. The only criticism is that it does not perform as good as other options. But this talk covered how the latest release has made massive performance improvements without sacrificing their functional principles. Another talk that I found most informative was on Saturday; “Managing Nation-wide traffic cameras and Sensors”. The most interesting thing about this is the political and societal implications around this. We eventually got to meet and thank the Signify team in person; and they were working hard and hospitable.

All in all, this was a very interesting, educational and fruitful conference, with plenty of talking points to take home, and lots of homework to do.

Thanks again, Signify for facilitating me this experience!

If you would like to view more videos and slides from Scale By the Bay, you can discover more here.

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